Names, brands, writing, and the language of commerce.

September 20, 2018

Mountain Dew, the neon-yellow-green soft drink brand owned by PepsiCo, evidently failed to consult anyone in Scotland before it introduced its new ad slogan, “Epic thrills start with a chug.” If it had, it would have learned that chug is Scottish slang for masturbate. (Jelisa Castrodale for Vice, via Language Log)

That word: It does not mean what you think it means. Not in Scotland, anyway. (Via @jaysebro)

In an article for Yahoo! Tech published last week, Rob Walker takes a mournful look at websites that fit neither of the Internet’s dominant tropes: Happy (“delightful and hilarious memes and GIFs and videos made by GoPro-wearing puppies”) and Angry (“nasty troll attacks, flame wars, and outrage galore”). “Some manifestations of the Sad Internet,” Walker writes, “make a mockery of the pervasive cliché of the magical technology that connects us all, builds community, and generally permits the ‘crowd’ to find and reward the wonderful.”

Among those manifestations (with my naming notes):

Forgotify:Walker writes that this site “plumbs Spotify’s unheard depths to present you with a random m selection from the zero-listen archives.” The -ify name, overplayed as it is, seems perfectly ironic here. And I appreciate the rhyme with Spotify.

No Likes Yet: “All the photos on Instagram with no likes yet.” I agree with Walker about the agreeable “note of optimism, or at least yearning” in that Yet. But the name suffers a little for not riffing more directly on Instagram. (Instagrump? Un-stagram? Disinstergram?)

Sad Tweets: “Connect the application to your Twitter account, and it presents you with a lowlights reel of your attempts at ‘sharing’ that attracted no likes, and no retweets.” Another brutally descriptive name, which probably is as it should be.

Kickended: What happens to Kickstarter crowdfunding campaigns that don’t raise a single dime? Kickended happens. Walker: “It’s a useful, albeit bleak, reality check. Yes, the Internet makes magic and wondrous and unprecedented things occur. But only sometimes, and not for everyone.” The name falls short of its goal, too: Kicked to the Curb is more to the point.

June 30, 2014

Fukubukuro: Grab bag or mystery bag containing unidentified items and sold at a substantial discount. Literally “lucky bag.” From Japanese fuku (“lucky”) and fukuro (“bag”); fukuro changes to bukuro because of a Japanese morphological phenomenon called rendaku, which affects the initial voicing of consonants.

A Japanese New Year’s custom since the late Meiji period (early 20th century), fukubukuro were introduced by Tokyo’s Ginza Matsuya department store and later spread to other retail establishments. Merchants in Honolulu’s Ala Moana Shopping Center adopted the tradition in 2004, and many Sanrio stores in the United States observe it as well.

Meh—an interjection meaning “I’m unimpressed” whose coinage is often attributed to the cartoon character Lisa Simpson—is the deliberately under-promising name for a site whose creators say will “keep it simple and stupid” by presenting a single deal each day:

It may amuse you. It may perform a necessary function in the digestive system of capitalism. Once in a while, it may even offer a kick-ass deal on something you actually want. But it isn't going to change your life, or give you more powerful orgasms.

As for the fukubukuro reward, it’s

a century-old tradition we're borrowing from the Japanese, where people buy crap in bags sight unseen and then are crushed by the inevitable, certain disappointment. (And for this Kickstarter-edition fukubukuro, we created a custom, original, one-page comic that you could call collectible if you have little understanding of that word.)

Meh is a project of Mediocre Laboratories, whose low-expectations name I wrote about last year. Matt Rutledge, Mediocre’s founder, “founded e-commerce site Woot a decade ago and is generally considered the granddaddy of the daily deal,” writesTechCrunch reporter Ryan Lawler. Amazon bought Woot for $110 million in cash in 2010.

May 09, 2014

Mother’s Day, as you surely know, is Sunday, May 11. Let’s celebrate in our own special way: with a roundup of “Mom” and “Mother” brands. (Skip to the end if you’d rather read about the semantic shadings of “mom” vs. “mother.”)

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Smile Mom is an Android and iOS app that’s “a mobile social community for moms” as well as a “social baby book” that “guides you through important milestones of your child while organizing family videos and photos.” It was launched in 2013 by the Korean software company Smile Family.

Mom Meet Mom“is a Match.com for the stroller crowd,” TechCrunch reported in January 2014. As the company itself puts it: “We have created a sophisticated matching algorithm designed exclusively for Mom Meet Mom to help you find local moms with similar interests, schedules, families, and personalities.”

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Momdoms—a mashup of “mom” and “condoms”—was conceived (sorry) to give parents “a clever, yet funny tool to start the sex conversation with their kids.” Fast Company reported last December that Momdoms condoms “come in tins featuring 1940s and ’50s-style women—i.e., the moms—and classic bits of mom wisdom: ‘Don't Make Me Come In There!’” Also available personalized with your own (or your mom’s picture).

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You’ve heard the old advice about never eating at a place called Mom’s. (It’s not really all that old: Barry Popik tracks it back to Nelson Algren’s 1956 novelA Walk on the Wild Side.) Plenty of restaurants blithely ignore the warning. One of the newer ones: Dear Mom, a hipster-ish joint (kale tacos; a dessert called The Dude) in San Francisco’s Noe Valley.

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Café Mom doesn’t serve food: it’s a virtual watering hole, established in 2006, “where moms come for conversation, advice, friendship, and entertainment.” No mom-and-pop outfit this: “We are the premier strategic marketing partner to the best brands, offering innovative custom solutions, contextually relevant media, and performance-driven targeting in order to help advertisers win with our audience.”

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Save the Mom sounds like an earnest nonprofit, but—hello!—it’s another “social” website and app. Founded in 2012 and based in San Francisco, Save the Mom “was born to help modern families in their daily communication needs, trying to aggregate in one place all the information shared within a family that now are scattered among sms, phone calls, emails, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and the likes [sic].”

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Let’s not forget the most sinister mom of all: MomCorp, the creepy corporate behemoth (beheMother?) on “Futurama” (Comedy Central).

MomCorp is not to be confused with Mom Corps, “a professional staffing and career development firm” founded in 2005.

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Here’s a tip: whenever you see a brand called Mother rather than Mom, furnish your own air quotes.

To be sure, there’s still a sweetly single-entendre Mother’s Cookies. Founded in Oakland in 1914—and named to honor the new holiday of Mother’s Day—it went bankrupt in 2008 (corporate bonds scandal), and was relaunched as a Kellogg’s brand.

Old Mother’s Cookies logo. The mother is considerably younger-looking now.

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But the newest incarnations of Mother take maternity a bit less literally.

Mother, from Sen.se (“Sense”), is a device that “imbues everyday objects with the gentle nagging power of our awesome moms” (according to TechCrunch). The gizmo stands about 6 inches tall, weighs 1 pound (450 grams), and bears a striking resemblance to the Shmoo from Al Capp’s “Li’l Abner” comic strip. (Like Mother, self-sacrificing Shmoos live to please.) In exchange for $222 you receive one Mother and four Motion Cookies—tiny sensors that can be affixed to toothbrushes, flowerpots, espresso makers, and other objects (or people) to check whether they’re being used properly.

The more I read about Mother, the more familiar its story sounded. Here are the opening paragraphs from the “Meaning of Life” page:

In 2003, we founded Violet based on this vision: all things will be connected. Violet led the way creating a Wi-Fi rabbit with an unpronounceable name. Its statement: from now on, anything can be connected to the Internet, anything, even rabbits.

Ten years have passed. Day after day, our 2003 dream is becoming more of a reality. Ten years have passed, but our vision has changed. This why we have created Sen.se. Back then, we thought the key words were things and connection. Today, we are convinced that the real issues are called life and meaning.

Aha! I wrote about that “Wi-Fi rabbit with an unpronounceable name”—Nabaztag—back in 2007.

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Other Mother brands are even more arch. Take the related ad agencies Mother New York and Mother London. Here’s how the former’s website describes its offerings (capitalization and punctuation verbatim):

The denim brand called MOTHER—all caps—is based in Los Angeles and sells $200 jeans (but not, you know, mom jeans) at Nordstrom, Piperlime, ShopBop, and Revolve. The styles have names like The Looker and The Cruiser.

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Finally, some observations about mother, mom, and mama:

“Gradually, over the past couple of decades, mom has become an acceptable synonym for mother in journalism — no longer thought to be too casual, informal or personal.” – John McIntyre, The Baltimore Sun, July 29, 2010

“This week Pew Research Center announced that, after decades of decline, an increasing amount of American women are “stay-at-home mothers. … Pew avoids ‘mom’ throughout their study, instead opting for the more venerating mother. (While moms make beef stroganoff, mothers are busy being matriarchs.)” – Katy Steinmetz, Time, April 11, 2014

“People hearing tot mom for the first time sometimes ask if it’s connected to another parenting-related compound word that has gained prominence in recent years: baby mama. Like tot mom, it means more than just a mother whose child is still a baby. A baby mama is an unwed mother, often one who makes trouble for her ‘baby daddy’ with her ‘baby mama drama.’ Where did these extra meanings come from?” – Neal Whitman, “Tot Moms and Baby Mamas,” in the Visual Thesaurus, July 11, 2011. (Neal goes on to answer the question.)

“Mom is everywhere and everything and damned near everybody, and from her depends all the rest of the U. S. Disguised as good old mom, dear old mom, sweet old mom, your loving mom, and so on, she is the bride at every funeral and the corpse at every wedding. Men live for her and die for her, dote upon her and whisper her name as they pass away, and I believe she has now achieved, in the hierarchy of miscellaneous articles, a spot next to the Bible and the Flag, being reckoned part of both in a way.” – Philip Wylie on “Momism” in A Generation of Vipers (1942)

The business and techbloggers who covered the episode found nothing amiss in the story. But to anyone who knows how business names work, it betrays the naïveté of the show’s creators.

The protagonist of “Silicon Valley” is a programmer, Richard, who’s inadvertently developed a file-compression algorithm. For reasons that haven’t yet been explained (and may never be), he named the algorithm—and the start-up he creates around it—“Pied Piper.”

Everyone but Richard hates the name. But that’s not his biggest headache.

December 19, 2013

In 1994, a Princeton graduate named Jeff Bezos left the New York hedge fund D.E. Shaw, where he had quickly risen through the ranks, to start a new venture. As Brad Stone tells the story in his new book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, Bezos went with a close friend, Jeff Holden, to a barbecue restaurant on 44th Street to strategize. They talked about the name of the business they wanted to start:

Bezos had tentatively decided to call his company Cadabra Inc., but was not committed to the name. Holden filled both sides of a piece of notebook paper with alternatives. The one Bezos liked best on the list was MakeItSo.com, after Captain Picard’s frequent command in Star Trek.

But MakeItSo didn’t stick. In August 1994, when Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, had moved to the Seattle area and was beginning to hire developers “to help pioneer commerce on the Internet,” he revisited the naming project:

The magical allusions of Cadabra Inc., as Todd Tarbert, Bezos’s first lawyer, pointed out after they registered that name with Washington State in July of 1994, were too obscure, and over the phone, people tended to hear the name as Cadaver. So later that summer, after renting a three-bedroom ranch house in the East Seattle suburb of Bellevue, Bezos and MacKenzie started brainstorming. Internet records show that during that time, they registered the Web domains Awake.com, Browse.com, and Bookmall.com. Bezos also briefly considered Aard.com, from a Dutch word, as a way to stake a claim at the top of most listings of websites, which at the time were arranged alphabetically.

Bezos and his wife grew fond of another possibility: Relentless.com. Friends suggested that it sounded a bit sinister. But something about it must have captivated Bezos: he registered the URL in September 1994, and he kept it. Type Relentless.com into the Web today and it takes you to Amazon.1

Still, Cadabra.com lived on through the fall, while Bezos set up his headquarters in a converted garage. Shel Kaphan, a founding employee, arrived in Seattle from California and “immediately began worrying about the company’s name”:

“I was once part of a little consultancy called the Symmetry Group, and people always thought we were the Cemetery Group,” says Kaphan. “When I heard about Cadaver Inc., I thought, Oh God, not this again.”

The final name selection occurred in late October 1994:

Bezos pored through the A section of the dictionary and had an epiphany when he reached the word Amazon. Earth’s largest river; Earth’s largest bookstore. He walked into the garage one morning and informed his colleagues of the company’s new name. He gave the impression that he didn’t care to hear anyone’s opinion on it, and he registered the new URL on November 1, 1994.

Later in the book, Stone tells the story of the Kindle, which was developed by an Amazon division dubbed Lab126 headed by Gregg Zehr. (Stone: “The 1 stood for a, the 26 for z; it’s a sublte indication of Bezos’s dream to allow customers to buy any book every published, from a to z.” The arrow in the Amazon logo also reinforces the a-to-z association.)

Lab126 reported to Steve Kessel, who had joined Amazon in 1999 and took over the new digital initiative in 2004.

In those waning months of 2004, the early Lab126 engineers selected a code name for their new project. On his desk, Zehr had a copy of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, a futuristic novel about an engineer who steals a rare interactive textbook to give to his daughter, Fiona. The early Lab126 engineers thought of the fictitious textbook in the novel as a template for what they were creating. Michael Cronan, the San Francisco-based graphic designer and marketing executive who baptized the TiVo, was later hired to officially brand the new dedicated reading device, and he came up with Kindle, which played off the notion of starting a conflagration and worked as both a noun and a verb.2 But by then Kessel’s team was devoted to the name Fiona and the group tried, unsuccessfully, to convince Bezos to keep it. In a sense, the knowledge-starved Fiona of Stephenson’s fictional world became Amazon’s patron saint in its risky journey into the digital frontier.

The code name for the Kindle 2, released in 2009, was Turing, “after a castle in The Diamond Age,” Stone writes. That castle was in turn named for Alan Turing, the pioneering British computer scientist best known for the Turing test, considered the foundation of artificial intelligence.

March 21, 2013

Last week Google announced that it’s pulling the plug on Google Reader, which for years has allowed people like me to subscribe to, organize, and quickly scan dozens or even hundreds of blogs and websites with RSS feeds. “While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined,” was the summary judgment. Cue gnashing of teeth and rending of garments.

I recall going through a similar period of mourning a few years ago when Bloglines shut down. After I made the switch to Google Reader I figured I was safe, which proves how little I know about capitalism and its discontents. Now, like the rest of the loyal followers, I’m searching for a Google Reader replacement. Suggestions welcome.*

In the meantime some eager minion at Prismatic noticed my public jeremiad and solicited my business via tweet. Here’s what I saw when I clicked the link:

Hey there, Prismatic: You’re missing a comma after “Hey there.”

Prismatic isn’t what I’m looking for – I want lists and folders, not a newspaper layout – but I do admire “Readerer.” I’ve written about other -erers – funnerer, gooderer, creamier-er, closerer, Maker’s-er, dumberer, et al. – but “Readerer” is the first agentive -erer that’s caught my attention.

March 18, 2013

Fiberhood: A neighborhood that has Internet access via fiber-optic cable. A blend of fiber and neighborhood.

Word Spy gives credit for the coinage of fiberhood to Google, which in July 2012 announced in its official blog that the company was introducing Google Fiber “to bring ultra-high [Internet] speeds to Kansas City, Kan. and Kansas City, Mo.” Milo Medin, Google’s vice president of access services, wrote:

When we asked people what they value in their Internet service, the majority of them simply said, “choice.” So we listened. Kansas Citians will choose where we install and when. We’ve divided Kansas City into small communities we call “fiberhoods.” To get service, each fiberhood needs a critical mass of their residents to pre-register. The fiberhoods with the highest pre-registration percentage will get Google Fiber first. Households in Kansas City can pre-register for the next six weeks, and they can rally their neighbors to pre-register, too. Once the pre-registration period is over, residents of the qualified fiberhoods will be able to choose between three different packages (including TV).

Now this might come as a surprise to many, but the number of communities with fiber-to-the-home has gone up sharply in past 15 months or so, according to a study by TIA.* I am going call these fiberhoods.

In the April 2013 issue of Harper’s magazine (access restricted to subscribers), Whitney Terrell and Shannon Jackson take a closer look at Google Fiber. To qualify, Kansas City had to give Google access to “underground conduits, fiber, poles, rack space, nodes, buildings, facilities, and available land.” It provided Google with free offices, meeting spaces, and a showroom, and it paid the company’s electric bill. Kansas City had no say in Google’s pricing and no guarantee that Google would deliver the service to all residents. “The mayor, moreover, is barred from commenting on Google’s activities without the express permission of Google,” Terrell and Jackson write.

From their article, “Only Connect”:

…Google’s fiberhood map bisected the city at Troost Avenue, a historical racial divide. It soon became clear that most lower-income black areas would fail to meet the preregistration quotas. Local teachers and librarians began canvassing door-to-door with Google employees, urging residents to sign up, and charitable groups raised money for registration fees. A majority of these fiberhoods ultimately qualified for service. But the frenzied volunteer push revealed an uncomfortable truth behind the city’s “real partnership” with Google: Kansas City had left itself powerless to guarantee service for its most vulnerable constituents. And it could not compel Google to redraw its maps in a less discriminatory way. (Of course, the vegan bakery, Pilates studio, and Italian deli next door to Google’s subsidized offices received their fiber service for free.)

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* The TIA (Telecommunications Industry Association) link is broken and I haven’t been able to find a working substitute.

July 23, 2012

MOOC: An acronym for “massive open online course,” an educational offering in which students and instructors are distributed (i.e., not in the same geographic location), enrollment is unrestricted (“open”), and course materials are dispersed across the Web.

MOOCs (rhymes with “flukes”) are seen by advocates as tools for democratizing education:

While the vast potential of free online courses has excited theoretical interest for decades, in the past few months hundreds of thousands of motivated students around the world who lack access to elite universities have been embracing them as a path toward sophisticated skills and high-paying jobs, without paying tuition or collecting a college degree. And in what some see as a threat to traditional institutions, several of these courses now come with an informal credential (though that, in most cases, will not be free). – “Instruction for Masses Knocks Down Campus Walls,” by Tamar Lewin, New York Times, March 4, 2012.

The oldest player in the MOOC world is Khan Academy, founded in 2006 by Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT and Harvard. Khan Academy currently offers more than 3,200 free videos on a wide range of subjects in the sciences and humanities. Newer rivals include Udacity (“You learn by solving challenging problems and pursuing udacious projects”; founded in 2011 as an outgrowth of free computer-science classes at Stanford); edX (a joint venture between MIT and Harvard that will offer its first classes in Fall 2012); Udemy, a platform for taking and creating courses (both free and paid), launched in 2010 by two Turkish developers who moved to Silicon Valley; and Coursera (founded in 2011 by two Stanford computer-science professors; most classes are free). Last week, Coursera announced a major expansion in which a dozen major research universities—including Caltech, Duke, and UC San Francisco—will participate.

Related: MOOSe, a massive open online seminar. “Next year,” wrote the Times’s Lewin in her March 4 article, “Richard DeMillo, director of Georgia Tech’s Center for 21st Century Universities, hopes to put together a MOOSe, or massive open online seminar, through a network of universities that will offer credit.”

The “massive” in MOOC and MOOSe may be influenced by the “massive” in MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) and MMOG (massively multiplayer online game). Those acronyms first appeared in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively.

Whether it’s exploring a new city, checking out a friend’s movie recommendation, or just finding new activities for your weekends, Schemer lets you discover new things to do, share schemes with friends, and make the most of your day.

But I have another problem with Schemer: I keep seeing it as a Yiddish word. As in, “You want some schemer with that bagel?”

Schmear game from JET (Jewish Educational Toys). More on the meaning and derivation of “schmear” here.

Alternatively: “He’s a schmendrick, he’s a schmo, he’s a schmuck. What a schemer!” Yiddish is, after all, full of words that begin with sch- and have an m somewhere in the word. (See my post about Libros Schmibros.)

Which made me remember (not verbatim, of course; I had to look it up) this Philip Roth passage from Portnoy’s Complaint:

The novelist, what’s his name, Markfield, has written in a story somewhere that until he was fourteen he believed “aggravation” to be a Jewish word. Well, this was what I thought about “tumult” and “bedlam,” two favorite nouns of my mother’s. Also “spatula.”

Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, that gonif, took Roth’s idea and put it in the mouth of that nice Gentile girl Donna Moss in Season 2 of The West Wing. He has Donna say to Toby Ziegler, “You know what word should be Yiddish but isn’t? ‘Spatula.’ Also, ‘far-fetched.’” (Right—as if Donna would know!)

Even if you’re not bringing a Yiddish-y, bagel-inflected bias to the pronunciation, “Schemer” still strikes me as a little off-kilter. There’s nothing overtly furtive—or schematic, for that matter—about the sorts of activities that get through Schemer’s filters: baking cookies, walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, reading the Steve Jobs biography, etc.

Oh Google, your aptly named new product Schemer doesn’t have us fooled. We know you’re calling it a new way to discover things to do, but we see this for what it really is — an assault against Foursquare and the company’s hold over quality location-based content, city tips and to-dos.

Diabolical indeed! Clearly, in its pursuit of Internet domination, Google won’t settle for anything less than the whole schmear.